1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to wireless radio telephones and, more particularly, to radio telephones operative with a private base station.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Modern cellular telephone systems currently utilize high power, frequency, time and/or code division multiplexed narrowband radio frequency communication techniques in conjunction with large cells to establish and maintain telephone communications. With the growing popularity of mobile stations configured for operating in these systems, increased flexibility in user utilization of these mobile stations is desired. One approach to providing user flexibility while encouraging greater utilization of the mobile stations is by providing low-power private base stations over which a user can register his or her mobile station and make and receive telephone calls. A private base station shares the same frequency bands with large cells, but operates at a greatly reduced power level. Also, each private base station has a land-line subscriber telephone number through which all incoming and outgoing calls are routed.
Although private base stations currently exist that can support registration of multiple mobile stations, a call received at a private base station for any one of mobile stations registered with this base station causes all mobile stations registered with the base station to be similarly alerted. While this type of operation has been generally satisfactory in the past when the likelihood of only one or two mobile stations would be registered with a private base station at any given time, it is now technically feasible and desirable to provide control information to a private base station which accommodates many more mobile stations for enabling the base station to produce an alerting signal for a mobile station only when an incoming call is received for this mobile station.